Venturized. October 31st, 2022
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Interesting news
📢 Stock image giant Shutterstock just partnered with OpenAI to incorporate the AI lab’s text-to-image model DALL-E 2 directly integrated into Shutterstock “in the coming months.” The stock image company is also promising to reimburse creators whose work is used to train AI art models with a new Contributors Fund.
📢 Andreessen Horowitz's flagship crypto fund shed around 40% of its value in the first half of this year. That decline, fund investors tell the outlet, is much larger than the 10% to 20% drops recorded by other venture funds that have largely avoided the risky practice of purchasing volatile cryptocurrencies.
📢 Elon Musk completed his takeover of Twitter and promptly fired CEO Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal, Head of Legal, Policy, and Trust Vijaya Gadde, and General Counsel Sean Edgett. Advertisers are already nervous and say they're worried about potential conflicts of interest around automotive advertising, given Musk's role at Tesla. A reinstatement of Donald Trump's Twitter account would also be a red line for some advertisers, an ad agency exec tells the outlet.
📢 Altimeter Capital, an investor in Meta, published an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg and the company’s board recommending that it cap metaverse investments at $5B per year, among other things. “Meta needs to re-build confidence with investors, employees, and the tech community to attract, inspire, and retain the best people in the world,” said the letter. “In short, Meta needs to get fit and focused.”
📢 Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, lost his billionaire status when Adidas cut ties with him. Forbes reported that his net worth dropped to $400M, which comes from his music catalog, real estate, and his 5% stake in ex-wife Kim Kardashian’s shapewear company, Skims. Forbes said his Adidas deal added $1.5B to his net worth.
Notable deals
Venture capital:
🚀 WATI, a startup that has built customer sales and engagement tools built on WhatsApp, raised a $23M Series B round led by Tiger Global, with DST Global Partners and Shopify also participating. WATI founders Bianca Ho and Ken Yeung began working together in 2016, building Clare.AI, an omnichannel AI digital assistant for large Asia enterprises. In 2020, they launched WATI to give SMBs a self-service, low-code product on the WhatsApp for Business API. The startup currently has more than 6,000 customers in 75 countries, including SMBs in spaces like house cleaning, schools, education centers, EdTech, FinTech, medical facilities, D2C brands, and Shopify stores.
🚀 Bit.io, a startup that claims it makes uploading and sharing Postgres databases as easy as editing a Google Doc, raised a $7.5M seed round co-led by Battery Ventures and GreatPoint Ventures, with Neo and Combine also contributing. Since its private beta opened in 2021, bit.io has grown quickly, with more than 15,000 users and 30,000 Postgres databases on the platform. Developers at companies like Ford, Visa, NHS, P&G, and Morgan Stanley use bit.io for production OLTP workloads, building web applications, low-code/no-code backends, data analysis, and mobile applications.
🚀 Pixaera, a three-year-old London startup that helps clients train employees through gaming, raised a $4.5M round led by LocalGlobe. Founder Mousa Yassin developed the platform based on his personal experience as a gamer. Whilst playing popular classics like Final Fantasy and World of Warcraft, he was able to identify that games can teach players vigil skills – problem-solving, creative thinking, teamwork, and goal setting – whilst still being engaging and fun.
🚀 Bearer, a startup that says it develops open-source code analysis engines that combine with proprietary heuristics to detect sensitive data flow and data security risks, raised a $4M seed round led by Alven, with additional investment from Kima Ventures, Partech, and Point Nine. The company focuses on a solution for developers to automatically detect sensitive data flow and data security risks while coding. Its policy engine proactively monitors data security policies before releasing code, and its remediation workflow prioritizes critical issues – including business logic flaws – for resolution between security and engineering teams.
🚀 Notebook Labs, a 10-month-old zero-knowledge identity protocol (the idea is to build anonymous identity verification and credit scoring for smart contracts), has raised $3.3M in seed funding led by Bain Capital Crypto. Other participants include Y Combinator, Soma Capital, Abstract Ventures, Pioneer Fund, and NFX. Notebook Labs intends to offer a way for Web3 protocols to verify the identity of users without compromising anonymity through a technology called zero-knowledge (zk) proofs, which algorithmically show that a statement is true without sharing the details behind that example. For example, a protocol could require proof that users are U.S. citizens. Users would supply their license as proof, but the license wouldn't be linked to the user’s wallet.
Exits:
🔥 Amazon is poised to take a stake in the parent of Hawaiian Airlines as part of a deal to expand the e-commerce giant’s cargo-hauling operations using a fleet of Airbus SE freighters.
Promising technology
👾 Meta has developed an AI translation system that can convert an oral language, Hokkien, to spoken English. CEO Mark Zuckerberg and software engineer Peng-Jen Chen shared a video demonstrating the tech. Hokkien, a language spoken by 45 million people, is one of 3000 other oral languages without an official, standard written system. This makes traditional text-based translation systems inapplicable. The system was developed as part of Meta's AI project called Universal Speech Translator, or UST, and this is certainly an impressive step toward developing AI to help eliminate language barriers. Similar tech will eventually allow people to talk to anyone with the help of real-time speech translations.
👾 TikTok announced Smart Performance Campaigns at its TikTok World event, an ad product that uses machine learning to “run performance campaigns at scale while reducing the number of manual steps to drive results." In its announcement, TikTok said that Smart Performance Campaigns outperformed manually set up campaigns by 80% in early tests.
Insightful data
In total, 1.5% of all venture dollars so far in 2022 have been allocated to Latin American-founded companies, a drop from 2.5% last year, according to a Crunchbase analysis.
